1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to systems and methods for sharing data between and among users of electronic devices.
2. Background
Location-based services are services that provide location-specific content or assistance to users. Location-based services typically depend on the ability to track the location of a user device or object—a process that is sometimes referred to as positioning. Some examples of location-based services include personal navigation, resource location, resource tracking, proximity-based notification, location-based billing, and emergency services.
Various systems currently exist for automatically determining the location of a user device or object. These systems include, for example, the Global Positioning System (GPS), WiFi-based positioning systems, cellular telephony based positioning systems and Bluetooth™-based positioning systems. Each of these systems provides its own set of relative advantages and disadvantages. For example, GPS can provide extremely precise location estimates, but does not work well in indoor environments or in areas prone to multipath effects such as urban canyons. WiFi-based positioning systems work better than GPS in indoor environments but require that the user be within transmission range of a number of wireless access points in order to operate. Cellular telephony based and Bluetooth™-based positioning systems have their own advantages and disadvantages as well.
Although multiple types of positioning systems exist, networks and telecommunications carriers typically adopt only one type of system for the provision of location-based services. Thus, users of each network/carrier must live with the particular set of disadvantages associated with the type of positioning system that is adopted. This may include, for example, the generation of unreliable location information at certain times or under certain conditions or the generation of location information having limited or divergent granularity.
Furthermore, since different networks/carriers use different positioning technology, there is presently a lack of sophisticated location-based services for users that extend across multiple networks or carriers. Additionally, there exists no system that can advantageously connect and leverage these various sources of location information, each of which may be producing location information in a different manner and having a different format, to produce an improved or more comprehensive set of location information. Indeed, since the beacons associated with certain positioning systems (namely, WiFi-based, cellular telephony based, and Bluetooth™-based positioning systems) have very different transmission ranges and signal strengths, there is a strong incentive to maintain information generated by these systems in separate information silos.
What is needed, then, is a system and method that can leverage the information generated by a variety of different sensor-enabled devices and objects, included sensor-enabled devices/objects associated with different types of positioning systems and with different networks and carriers, to generate a database of real-time device/object locations that can be used for the provision of location-based services and other types of services, such as data sharing services.